[gregjor]

The job market decides what skills get someone hired. That has nothing to do with how we might describe HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are markup languages, not general-purpose programming languages.

The distinction is important in the job market because if you only use HTML and CSS you can only create static web pages. That may be good enough for a small subset of web development but it’s not enough for a web application with user interaction beyond clicking links and buttons, or with any persistent state (like a database). Whether we call HTML/CSS “programming languages” or not makes no difference. The “gatekeeping” comes from lack of sufficient utility.